Dennis Ritchie died - All software runs on his creations

If you use OS X, Linux, iOS or Android (and many other non-consumer OS) you’re using an operating system which was designed on top of the Unix operating system, which was co-created by Dennis Ritchie.

Even if you’re using Windows you’re using an operating system which was (at least partly) written in C, one of the most widely used and efficient programming languages out there. Dennis Ritchie designed this programming language, which not only powers operating systems but probably also your microwave and most video games you’ve played.

If you’ve read about C++ or Objective-C, then that C you see there stands for Dennis Ritchie’s C. Even if you’ve only read about Java or JavaScript, these languages were also heavily influenced by C.

For those who don’t know much about computers, you probably at least know that computers run on ones and zeroes. Well, we humans suck at writing ones and zeroes so assembly language came out to change coding in ones and zeroes to coding using mnemonics or “words easy to remember”. Still assembly language is very specific for each computer and not very intuitive so we have C which lets us tell the computer what to do even if we don’t know which computer will run the code. So you could say that C is the language closest to computer language which is most widely used in the world.

I personally don’t write much C given that there are higher level languages which will help you do the job with less code, faster, safer and with more abstractions. Nevertheless C and Unix are one of the most important contributions to computer science and the man who contributed them has past away.

#include<stdio.h>
int main()
{
    int i = 0;
    int times = 1000000;
    for(; i < times; i++)
    {
         printf("Thank you Dennis Ritchie.\n");
    }
    return 0;
}